4 Kids' Fruit Drinks That May Be Worse for Them Than Soda

Listen up, parents. Turns out that the fruit drink your kids are slurping down at lunch time may actually be worse for them than infamous health enemy No. 1, soda. Popular so-called "fruit drinks" such as Capri Sun, Sunny D, Hi-C, and others, are under fire not only for packing in tons of added sugar (Hi-C has a staggering 25g of sugar per juice box), but for misleading consumers by marketing them as healthy options ("Packed with Vitamin C!").

As a part of a new study of 1,000 surveyed parents, researchers at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut discovered that while just over 60 percent of parents said they had given their kids soda at least once in the past month, almost 80 percent had given their children these “fruit drinks.”

As it turns out, none of these drinks contain much fruit at all, with very few boasting anywhere near (and certainly never more than) 10 percent real fruit juice. Sports drinks like Gatorade are also suspect for containing lots of sugar.

The moral of the story? Be wary of items with over-the-top health messaging of any kind. The good stuff probably doesn't have to convince you quite so desperately.

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